Adobe Slate for amazingly designed image stories

Adobe now has a sizeable collection of mobile apps that are some of the most technically impressive and well designed apps available on the iPhone and iPad.

Which brings me to Adobe Slate, one of the most recent additions to Adobe’s mobile app stable. Unlike many of their other apps which directly integrate and complement Adobe’s desktop apps like Photoshop or Illustrator. Slate is its own distinct product. Adobe describes Slate as a tool to “turn any document into a beautiful visual story”, which is actually quite a good way to describe it. A more mechanical way of describing Slate would be that it is an iPad-only app for creating a webpage (not a website) for situations where the content you want to share or display is a mix of text and images.

What makes Slate so impressive is that it is incredibly easy to get something created and published that looks truly fantastic, without much effort. A big part of why it’s so easy is because Slate comes with 11 great themes that range from the playful ‘Whimsy’ theme, the professional ‘Crisp’ theme and the bold ‘Wesley’ theme. Once you’ve chosen a theme (which you can change at any time), you just need to fill out the content. In order to do that, Slate comes with a handful of different content blocks that you’ll build your webpage with, and there’s one for photos, text, links and photo grids. Each block covers the width of the page, and you simply work your way down the page, adding blocks until you’re done.

With the photo blocks, you are given some options as to how the image appears: it can be inline, fill the screen, appear in a window, or be the full width of the page. You’re also able to add images from a whole range of sources, not just your Photos library on the iPad. Slate can also do a search for Creative Commons-licensed photos, or pull photos from Lightroom or your Creative Cloud and Dropbox accounts.

John Cowell is a practicing ICT & Computing Teacher. He has over 25 years experience working in schools and colleges across the UK teaching and leading ICT, Computing and Design Technology. He has extensively worked with schools to deliver bespoke training to help teachers use ICT as an effective teaching and learning tool. He has recently been training teachers how to develop their own resources for interactive and immersive teaching and learning and helping teachers to integrate mobile technology into their classrooms. With a robust background in an array of hardware and software John is able to deliver imaginative and learning centered training sessions involving resource creation, photography and media skills, teaching and learning delivery, video creation, animation, and music creation, App creation and bespoke database design. One of John’s main expertise is making the technology work for your teaching and learning in your classroom.